Flaws in state balloting loom large

Recount in close vote would be a "mess' despite reform efforts.

August 29, 2004|By Tim Darragh Of The Morning Call

Four years after the Florida presidential vote taught the other 49 states that they needed to modernize and improve safeguards in their voting systems, key reforms in Pennsylvania remain incomplete or undone.

Even where Pennsylvania completed reforms, experts fear that new challenges have been created, leaving the state vulnerable to the type of voting and ballot-counting fiascoes that marked the presidential vote in 2000.

Weaknesses in Pennsylvania's system of voting and counting ballots stand out at a time when polls show President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in a virtual dead heat in Pennsylvania. The potential for a recount brouhaha rises as the vote difference between the candidates narrows.

"A statewide recount would be a mess in Pennsylvania," said Larry Frankel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. "If we had a situation like Florida, we'd have as big a problem, if not a bigger one."

The security of Pennsylvania's vote could be jeopardized in at least three ways: a troubled, incomplete statewide voter registration database, a lack of voting recount standards, and archaic voting systems. Also, with elections overseen separately in each of the 67 counties, training for Election Day workers and voter education efforts can vary substantially.

Throughout Pennsylvania and other hotly contested states, the Bush and Kerry campaigns will have squads of lawyers ready to rumble in any district where fraud or voter suppression is suspected.

"There's going to be a lot of crap that comes out after the election," predicted Michael Shamos, a lawyer and teacher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The potential for a traumatic, divisive post-election vote count is not restricted to Pennsylvania. Despite the passage of a federal law in 2002 designed to modernize elections, the process of voting and counting votes is a state function, and most states sought and received waivers from provisions of the law that would have taken effect before the Nov. 2 election. Voters and poll workers in Florida and some other states also will be tested by new computer voting machines whose reliability is in question.

A close vote, combined with the nation's highly polarized electorate, is a recipe for a repeat of the Florida fiasco, said Doug Lewis, executive director of Election Center, a nonprofit organization that works with election administrators.

He fears the extreme partisanship of the presidential campaign will cause the losing side to blame election workers and lead to lawsuits that sap the public's faith in the process.

Following the headaches of the 2000 election, settled only when a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the recount of the presidential vote in Florida should be stopped, the dirty linen of elections in the United States was exposed for all to see.

It included partisan political officials heading elections, inaccurate registration lists that disenfranchised thousands of legal voters, ill-prepared election workers and improper ballots. It also included a lack of standards determining what constituted a vote -- leading to the sight of elections workers gazing into punch card ballots, trying to determine what voters had in mind when they created little paper perforations called chads, whether pregnant, dimpled, hanging or swinging.

In the end, a joint study by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that up to 6 million votes in 2000 -- nearly 6 percent of the vote -- were lost because of inadequate systems or human error. By no means were the problems limited to Florida. Illinois, South Carolina and Georgia had higher rates of spoiled or lost votes than Florida, the study found.

As in other states, Pennsylvania election officials knew they had work to do to avoid problems by the time the 2004 presidential election rolled around.

Gov. Tom Ridge established a Voting Modernization Task Force, which made recommendations beginning in 2001. A year later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. The new law thrust more demands, and the promise of money to cover upgrades, onto the states.

Some of those reforms are in place. Pennsylvanians can cast provisional ballots if poll workers cannot find their names on voter lists. Security will be enhanced as first-time voters and those going to a polling place for the first time will be required to provide identification.

But other reform efforts either failed or won't be completed by November.

The most glaring example can be found in 56 counties' election bureaus, where county workers struggle with the new voter registration database.

Known as SURE, for Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, the database is the center of a $20 million plan to centralize the list of voters in Pennsylvania.